When I considered my selection of books on mathematics, I was struck by
how much more uniform the quality is than in other fields. For instance,
based on my sampling, the Springer "Graduate Texts in Mathematics" (the
famous "yellow books") nearly all have this canonical quality --- all
200-odd books. The primary difficulty is the ordering in which one reads;
how should one structure one's attack on mathematics?

> One could extend your idea to key "papers" in a field as well, especially
> if particular papers originated the field.

I like this idea, especially as several major journals are extending their
archives backwards in time. The premier physics journal, the Physical
Review, expects to make all articles back to 1893 available soon, which
would make it possible to link to the papers.

Currently the reviews are only for one subject area, quantum
computation, but the idea could easily be extended to other areas.
Interestingly, researchers within quantum computation are beginning to
cite the archive in their papers.